


I Try (to Say Goodbye and I Choke)

by historiologies



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, High School AU, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, all the other seventeen members are mentioned but not significantly, if you know me and if you squint you can maybe spot other pairings, non-linear AND stream-of-consciousness! ba-bam!, very weird writing style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 21:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13935750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historiologies/pseuds/historiologies
Summary: Chan moves from Ilsan to Seoul, and his life changes the day he meets Seungkwan and Vernon.A submission to Snowflower2k18, a maknae-line ficfest.





	I Try (to Say Goodbye and I Choke)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from the famous Macy Gray song.
> 
> I've always wanted to write a Chankwan!! Thank you to the wonderful Snowflower mod Eggo for finally giving me an opportunity to do it! :D Loving the works by everyone this month, tbh. More love for the best maknaeline please <3
> 
> I'm not 100% happy with how this turned out--I know some of you think this feels rushed for the style and I kind of agree. But I really wanted to try something even more stream-of-consciousness than 'san fran' and so... here it is. If anything is unclear, please feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to answer your queries.
> 
> Please love Chankwan, these two cute adorable babies <3

“Welcome to Mom’s Midnight Kitchen!”

Chan meets him again on his first day of work.

Honestly, he wasn’t even going to come in here but he was on a bit of a high after finishing his first show as the new midnight dj at the local station. Sure, radio’s a dying art and for the first hour he had no callers at all, but he finished off strong with an homage to the folk rock classics of the late 70s, and when he’d turned it over to the early morning crew, he was told that the station managers were very pleased with how he handled everything.

This meant that adrenaline pumped him up so desperately that he now had something akin to a caffeine kick but without the annoying heart palpitations and the general feeling of wanting to jump off a cliff. It’s not just that he’s quite possibly starving but also he kind of remembers reading his old friend Vernon replying to his Facebook status about his new job saying that he works somewhere nearby and they’re open after midnight maybe he could stop by sometime and hang out. The adrenaline makes him brave, it seems, because he doesn’t even realize where he’s going until he parks his car in the near-empty lot and walking up the steps to the diner.

When he pushes the door open everything is what he expects and also not. Syrup and flour and strawberries invade his senses every time he inhales, but the colors are oddly muted for a 24 hour diner, no shining white overhead lights to cast even darker shadows on the table surfaces. There’s hardly anyone inside; only about two tables filled and the other booths empty.

“Hey man.”

Chan hears him first, and he breaks out into a huge smile when he sees him. His old friend. An assortment of handshakes and high fives are exchanged, and he’s ushered into a booth. 

“Is it usually this quiet?”

Vernon turns his words over in his head, slowly, measured. “It’s Tuesday,” he says.

Chan nods.

They get caught up, with people and places and things between them both. How’s Joshua hyung he’s great and Soonyoung hyung how’s he I still keep in touch with Minghao yeah I heard he and Mingyu hyung are really making their mark how’s your mom she’s good and your dad he’s great too.

They reach the point in their conversation where the giant elephant in the room looms over them, the silence falling between them turning sticky.

“How’s—” 

“Seungkwan’s—” 

They both stop simultaneously, and laugh nervously.

“How’s Seungkwan?” Chan asks.

Vernon smiles, and Chan can almost see the exact moment it turns sly from sweet. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Chan freezes, and he’s pretty sure the way his face contorts as he watches Vernon look over his shoulder to call someone in from the kitchen would put any horror movie vixen to shame. As luck would have it, it’s a look of constipated shock that’s on his face when his former worst enemy and love of his life walks into the room.

—-

The first time he meets him is on the first day of middle school.

Chan’s just moved to Seoul from Ilsan, which is just near enough to be near and far enough to be far. He spends the summer before high school playing in parks and watching television and trying so hard not to resent his father the opportunity that took him away from his friends and closest family. His baby brother doesn’t get it, his mother is just excited to redecorate.

Middle school is the worst, a bastion of unmitigated rivalries and resentment. No one wanted to be at the bottom of the totem pole so kids would lash out and try to push above whomever was around them conveniently less self-assured and put-together. It’s a circle of cowardice, and Chan hates it, hates that he doesn’t know if he’s brave enough to break out of it.

His mom packs him a nice lunch for his first day, but by recess he’s struggling to get it back from a boy in his class named Hyukmoo, who is both taller and louder than him. City boys are raised like that, Chan thinks, tears tingling at the corners of his eye. They are raised to be tough but in truth they are raised to be mean. He keeps reaching for his bright blue lunchbox, dangled just out of reach, and he tries to ignore how so many people are pointing and snorting and giggling and— 

Everyone stops.

Chan finally reaches up and gets his lunch box back, red in the face and furious, but everyone is looking at the open window just above the quadrangle where all the other people in his grade are hanging out. Two boys, a year or two above them by the looks of it, are hanging outside the window, and one of them (the one with the rounder cheeks, Chan thinks to himself) is cradling a bunch of tangerines in his arm. His other arm is bent backwards, fingers twisted around another tangerine, aimed at them. 

It is only then that Chan notices a lone orange fruit slowly rolling away from Hyukmoo’s body.

“Yah,” says the Tangerine Boy. He is glaring fiercely at Hyukmoo. “Get the hell off!”

“Seungkwannie, language,” the boy next to him says, amusedly.

Hyukmoo tries to glare at him, but the other boy not only is a sunbae, he’s also intensely scary despite the round cheeks and the armful of fruit. He eventually gets accosted by his cohorts and is led away back into the shade over on the other side of the court, with a final glare over his shoulder at Chan and his blue lunchbox.

Chan stares as the two boys—his rescuers?—shimmy out the low window and out into the yard.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

The one with the big smile waves cheerfully at him. “I’m Vernon, what’s your name?”

“Chan,” he answers; his eyes, however, are trained on the other boy.

“Did you want some?” the other boy says. He’s talking about his oranges. Chan shakes his head rapidly.

“No.”

“Then why are you looking at me?”

“I just,” Chan says. He hates that he stammers a little. “I was just wondering… your name?”

Vernon giggles, hits the other boy’s chest with the back of his palm. “Rude!” he tells his friend, and the boy with oranges turns slightly pink at the accusation. “Tell the kid your name.”

“It’s… Seungkwan.”

“Seungkwan,” Chan repeats. “Thank you for, you know.”

Seungkwan lets out a little scoff, wrinkles his nose just once. “Don’t mention it.” He tilts his head at him, gestures towards the shade of the tree. “Sit with us, Channie.”

Chan is confused. “I-I’d like that, but why?”

Vernon hangs an arm around Chan’s neck; they’re almost the same height. “We went to school with Hyukmoo in grade school, and you went toe to toe with him even though he’s much bigger than you. Which means you’re cool.”

The bright-eyed boy gave Chan a big smile, and Chan isn’t necessarily feeling very cool, but hearing such an assessment from the boy he’d just met made his tiny chest swell with pride. Cool. Him.

“Plus,” he adds, poking at Seungkwan, silent through all this. “Seungkwan always gives out oranges on our first day from his mom, and he has extras he wants to share.”

Chan looks over at Seungkwan, and he’s surprised to see Seungkwan peering at him carefully, like Chan was a workbook problem that he had to solve in two minutes.

“Thank you.”

Seungkwan pokes an elbow into his side, and scoffs again. “What did I say about not mentioning it?” He tosses the tangerine at Chan, who stumbles but manages to catch it. “Come on, we only have ten more minutes until the bell rings. Those are from Jeju, you know. Which means they’re the best.”

“Just like Seungkwan,” Vernon says, and Chan thinks, oh, as Seungkwan slaps Vernon in the shoulder as his ears turn pink.

—-

Eventually, Chan makes friends. Vernon’s and Seungkwan’s friends. He doesn’t expect to find himself the youngest of 12 other people who make it a point to simultaneously dote on and make fun of him, but one Saturday, he finds himself sitting on the floor while his friends are strewn around the room; they’re all watching tv—some popular variety show—and Jeonghan has his head in Minghao’s lap while carrying on a loud conversation with Seungcheol, on the bed across the floor. Joshua and Vernon are to his right, whispering in English and giggling every other minute, and behind him on the couch, Junhui is murmuring softly as Jihoon fusses with his hair nonchalantly. Seokmin and Mingyu sit on either side of Minghao, but Mingyu is dozing off and Seokmin looks like he needs to go to the bathroom but doesn’t want to get in between the debate between Seungcheol and Jeonghan. Soonyoung, secretly Chan’s favorite, is leaning back against Chan’s bent knees, and Wonwoo sits next to him, poking him incessantly just to annoy. On his left, Seungkwan curls up against his side, and Chan tries not to sink into the feeling of his warmth, tries not to get distracted from the tv show, but it’s hard, especially with Seungkwan smelling just like spring.

“Channie, stop moving,” Seungkwan murmurs, tugging even closer. His head nestles even further into his neck; Chan exhales, and it is in that moment that he realizes that he’s glad they moved to Seoul. 

—-

Relationships are complicated.

Being the youngest of your friend group is often accompanied with the baggage of no one taking you seriously. Not really. Everyone has either taken you under their wing as their adoptive brother or only bother to give you the time of day when they need something from you — a twenty or affirmation, it’s all the same in his book.

Chan knows this, and even though he misses Jeonghan and Soonyoung and Seokmin when they’ve all respectively graduated, he feels like everything evens out when it’s just him, Vernon and Seungkwan left in school.

That’s the thing — relationships are complicated and friendships are hard. Simplicity is always a line drawn between two people, because if you add in another person, something else takes shape, incorporates another dimension, another point-of-view. Everyone almost always looked at the three of them and pinpoints Chan as the odd man out, which is just a silly way of viewing things. Silly and incorrect.

In their second year of high school, Chan finally asks Vernon if anything is going on between him and Seungkwan, like he’d always thought there was throughout middle school. Vernon laughs, laughs so hard he almost busts a gut.

“Seungkwan’s my best friend, and that’s all.”

The conversation could have ended there, but it didn’t.

“Besides, even if I did, he’s only looked at you.”

—-

“Channie?”

Chan’s nose crinkles at the affectionate nickname, but stifles a laugh when Seungkwan’s fingers—beautiful, narrow, fragile—trail across his chest, trace patterns down his side. His own hands handcuff the other’s when they start dipping below his waist.

Seungkwan pouts. “You are no fun.”

“I have a test tomorrow” is what Chan fully intends to say, but he looks at the way Seungkwan’s eyes glint as he peers up at him through his eyelashes, and swoops down to press his lips to the corner of Seungkwan’s mouth instead, the side that quirks a little every time he says he’s not acting out for attention, the side that tilts up more when he’s telling him he loves him. Arms tighten around him and Chan acquiesces and lets go, lets go to be able to feather his hands up Seungkwan’s arms so he can frame his face, holding it in place so he can keep on kissing him and it’s addicting, feeling the curve of Seungkwan’s smile against his lips, knowing that that smile is for him and him alone, a secret that he’s happy to keep to himself.

“You are a terrible influence on me,” Chan says instead.

Seungkwan laughs, delightful little frissons of sound shaking his frame, spreading to Chan’s. “I try.”

He can while away afternoons like this for the rest of his life, Chan thinks, as their legs tangle together with the sheets, as the autumn breeze filters through the window. As long as Seungkwan is there, Chan can face anything.

—-

Seungkwan is there.

He wasn’t always, and neither was Chan. University had taken them far away from each other, and they both decided that it was better for both of them that they broke up rather than have resentment build between them with the distance. It was the mature thing to do, they had decided.

That didn’t mean that it didn’t break Chan’s heart.

Chan tried dating in college, and in the year and a half that followed after, but every time anything came close to being serious, he’d close his eyes and think of round cheeks, long fingers and the smell of oranges and cherry blossoms.

To be fair, Soonyoung had told him a few months ago when they saw each other for a drink, he _had_ carried a torch for Seungkwan for about five or so years, give or take a few months. Surely that kind of feeling, especially after having gotten together and experiencing all of his firsts with that person, would never really go away. But he had to try.

Of course, Soonyoung is in denial about his own complicated relationship, so Chan discounts everything he says.

The truth is, the only trying Chan wants to do is to try to find his way back into Seungkwan’s life. 

Being back didn’t necessarily mean things were going to be easy. Still. He could try.

He wanted to.

—-

Seungkwan is there, looking exactly the same, except older and leaner of face. What a shame. He misses those cheeks.

“Channie?”

Seungkwan is there, and if Chan is honest, Seungkwan has always been there.

“Seungkwan.”

He inhales, and it smells like spring again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at @allthatconfetti on twitter and cc.


End file.
